


Brave New World

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 18:24:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1559777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In New York, too many years into the future he was meant to have, Steve is used to living with the ghosts. But it's Bucky's ghost - the one he invented, the one he named - that may push him over the edge.</p><p>This is HORRIBLY DEPRESSING. *coughs* You've been warned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brave New World

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU anyway (see end notes for spoilers), but it's even more AU given the new movie. So pretend Steve and the Avengers live in Stark Tower in New York City.
> 
> And bring tissues. I'm very sorry. Someone give me something less tragic to write.

Tony was on his fourth – fifth? - glass of scotch when he mentioned the SHIELD records. The Stark prodigy had a finely cut glass dangling from one hand while the other flicked out to illustrate both the general direction of the SHIELD facility and what he thought of it. He sprawled sideways over a chair that doubtless cost more than Captain America did, even now that he was trademarked.

 

In the dim lamplight, Tony could have been his father, from his drink of choice to his loose smirk, from the abrasive genius he'd inherited to the demons Howard had never escaped. “I've copied all their files, if you're interested,” he continued grandly, oblivious to the scrutiny. Steve had sketched Howard like that, once, all smudged charcoal lines that still couldn't hide the shadows in his eyes.

 

“Um, thank you?” he hazarded when Tony seemed to be waiting for a reply. There were probably several things worth reading in the records, but that didn't explain why it had come up in the middle of a story about accidentally detonating MIT's dormitories when Stark was seventeen. Though the five – six? - glasses of scotch probably explained a lot.

 

“You really should go through them.” But that was Bruce, who hadn't drunk anything stronger than tea all night, leaning back against the Stark heir's chair, his shoulder just brushing Tony's knee. Steve perched on his own chair across from them, too polite to turn down Tony's demand that he have a drink and stop fleeing to his rooms like _an old man_.

 

“ . . Okay?” Despite having drunk several glasses of what was probably very expensive whiskey, Steve was still unfailingly sober. Maybe that's why this conversation was so confusing. “Anything in particular I'm looking for?” Because Bruce wasn't one for non sequiturs. He was more like Dernier, saying only what needed to be said and then returning to his experiments, calculating formula ratios and measuring the circumference of an explosion. Dernier, who built bombs for the Commandos because he couldn't build a bridge back to his wife and child, the family he'd lost in the war.

 

Bruce tilted his head up to look at the man above him, face so gentle that Steve couldn't imagine this man could ever contain the Hulk's terrifying rage. Tony scrunched his nose and huffed, while Steve tried not to stare at the hand Bruce reached back and hooked around a tapping foot, long fingers curled over bare skin. The leg stilled, and when Tony's free hand dropped into Bruce's dark hair Steve had to look away. “Oh,  _fine_ , I'll do your damn dirty work, Banner,” he growled, draining his glass and staring directly across the room. Steve suddenly felt like an insect under glass, pinned down and slowly dissected by knowing eyes. “You scream in your sleep, Cap, and it's scaring Jarvis.”

 

Steve was  _almost_ entirely sure that was impossible. “I don't -”

 

“And there are files of Captain America during the war,” Tony pressed on, over Steve's weak protest. This became much easier when the other man stopped breathing. “There are newsreels, your old sketchbooks, some propaganda shorts of the Wailing Banshees.”

 

“Howling Commandos,” Bruce corrected, though they all knew Tony had grown up with enough stories to recite the names of each member and their serial numbers in his own sleep.

 

Steve placed his glass gingerly on the mahogany table before he could shatter it, and tried to swallow past the rock lodged in his throat. “I don't – think I understand,” he croaked, lacing his fingers together and squeezing hard, as if he were still a child learning how to pray.

 

There was sympathy in Bruce's eyes, but Howard had had none of that to pass on to his son, and Tony plowed forward like a train with no brakes, like bitterly cold air sweeping over the Alps. “We thought you might want to see your old sketchbooks. Must have drawn him, right? My dad said you two were closer than brothers.” Tony might have been trying to comfort him, or he might have been leering. Tony had inherited the Stark charisma without any of Howard's charm. “Fury hasn't taken care of the newsreels for shit, but your boy is still front and center in them.”

 

~*~

 

They had been wrong about that. Bucky hadn't headlined a single reel. He'd never refused, but the days the office had told him to come in early he had simply disappeared, one more shell-shocked victim wandering through the rubble of London. The only ones he showed up in were the ones Dugan had taken out in the field, terrible films where Steve was always frowning at a map while Morita juggled for the camera and Falsworth held up a sign that said, “Join the war effort. Send whiskey.” Bucky sat next to Steve, head only an inch or so above his shoulder, cigarette hanging from his mouth. And if Steve's hand had rested on his best friend's knee – well, they were a tight-knit team.

 

He bought a new sketchbook: walked into the store and picked one from a whole row of them, then paid the young shop girl with the plastic rectangle Tony had given him. And he went back up to the Records Room, and paused the reels the way that Bruce had shown him, and drew.

 

At night, when he woke up screaming, Bucky's face was etched in ink against his eyelids, black against the unending white of the snow.

 

The reels were all dubbed with some narrator going on about the Howling Commandos. Steve turned off the sound, and listened for the crackle of the film that the Stark sound system never had while he watched Dernier demonstrate how to build a bomb in a juice can, followed by Falsworth and Jones doing a terrible rendition of the polka. Dugan pulled a bird out of his bowler. When the bird shat on Dugan's head Morita had laughed so hard he'd shot whiskey out of his nose. (Who knew Falsworth's sign would have worked? They'd gotten three cases of whiskey, and Howard had sent at least one that was still full.)

 

It was a bad parody of a talent show, and they'd made Steve dress up in a cape while Bucky drew on a mustache and struck such a ridiculous pose for a German dictator that Superman collapsed with a terrible fit of the giggles. Hitler had declared victory, until the Commandos came charging out in their shorts and tackled him to the ground. Steve couldn't believe the U.S. government had let  _anyone_ see that film, even their own war department. Who would take them seriously when they realized that the Allies' crack team was only a bunch of hooligans whose captain took more orders than he gave?

 

He paused the reel where Bucky stood with one foot on Steve's chest, an absurdly solemn look on his face behind the fake mustache, his hand raised in the sign for Victory. He mapped out each fingernail, cursing at the ones tucked behind Bucky's thumb, trying to remember if the ring finger had been shorter than the middle finger, or – His ring finger. Steve threw the sketchpad to the floor so he didn't crush it, then rocked forward on a breath that sounded worse than the first winter he'd had pneumonia. He choked back the keening noise that seemed to be coming from his mouth, the only other sound the soft hum of Stark electronics. And Jarvis.

 

“Sir? Are you well? Should I call for -”

 

“No. No.” He had to say it twice to hear himself, to steady his tongue. “Jarvis?”

 

“Yes, sir?” The disembodied voice offered its own comfort. No one would see Steve collapse over a poorly orchestrated skit, a half-drawn set of fingers.

 

“Men – men can marry now, can't they? Other men?” He had read that somewhere, he thought, but he didn't trust half the information the SHIELD psychologists had given him.

 

“Yes, sir, in some states. Would you like a list? Or perhaps some history on the legality of -”

 

“No. Thank you, Jarvis. That's plenty.” A lifetime in ice, a lifetime he could never have spent with Bucky without someone asking questions, people who believed they _owned_ Captain America because he wore their flag. And now, now Steve could buy a ring for anyone he chose, and it didn't matter because Bucky's hand had slipped from his grasp decades ago, had left Steve alone in what was meant to be a better world.

 

When he dreamed, later, Bucky's outstretched hand wore a slim, gold band – no protection at all against the fall, a dull glow quickly lost in the blinding white and biting cold. He woke up on the floor, shivering and hoarse. Jarvis  _did_ sound scared, after all.

 

~*~

 

“C'mon Cap, we're going out.” The Avengers were finishing their dinner, Natasha precisely flaying the skin from a lychee in a way that made Clint swallow and shift his chair back, Bruce fiddling with the machine that apparently washed the dishes and cleared the table, Pepper bent over a tablet with a full glass of wine next to a half-empty bottle. Steve had only cut through the kitchen because it was by the elevators, his sketchbook – the third he'd bought – tucked under his arm, a pencil behind his ear.

 

“Um,” he fumbled, glancing away from Tony's searching gaze at the silver elevator doors. “I'm – It's.” His fingers itched to flip through his old sketches, to hold them up to Bucky's enlistment photo and mark down all the differences, each freckle and unruly strand of hair. Tony was wasting his time. “I have plans,” he finally said, trying not to be curt.

 

Stark moved quickly, even out of his suit, and had blocked Steve's view of the exit. He threw a companionable arm across the Captain's shoulders that felt like a vise. “I'm sure you do,” he agreed, tone dark. “But those plans don't seem to be helping you sleep at night. And they're starting to take up an awful lot of your day.” He gave Steve another one of those long glances, as if he were hoping to flay Captain America like Natasha's fruit and fix all his faulty wiring. “We're having a team night.”

 

The  _team_ looked surprised to hear it, but recovered quickly. And all tried to escape at the same time.

 

“I have to -”

 

“I think Phil wants -”

 

“These contracts aren't going to wait for -”

 

“Excellent!” Tony gave them a smile slicker than Steve had ever seen, and he thought Howard's smirk had been unbeatable. “So we're all agreed. Movie, or club?”

 

The team fell grudgingly into line when Tony promised to buy all their drinks, and Steve found himself braced against strangers and the vibration of music through sticky floors, the only light the glow of an illicit cigarette. Natasha had climbed onto a podium that seemed to exist for people to exhibit themselves, looking sleek and untouchable as she danced. Clint was hanging over the second floor balcony with a beer, Phil tucked beside him. Tony and Pepper were flashes of pale skin in the dark, the glint of his tan chest and her long legs as they danced, Bruce watching avidly from the edge of the crowd.

 

Natasha dragged him onto the floor a moment later, though all Steve wanted was to go home and change out of the ridiculously tight clothes and into jeans and sketch Bucky's face until it was inked across his skin and cut into his palms. But if he closed his eyes and slid into the sea of bodies, he could paint Bucky over some stranger's cheekbones, bury his fingers in hair oily from too many days in the field and not too much product. If he closed his eyes, he could draw Bucky's slim hips over the garish leather pants of the young man in his arms, his friend's rough stubble and devious tongue. It was dark in the club, dark enough to blot out the painful brilliance of the snow for a moment. Dark enough to forget that he was alone.

 

~*~

 

Fury called them all in at six the next morning, and Steve thought for an instant that someone had seen before he remembered that it was a new century and no one  _cared_ . The head of SHIELD scowled at their appearance: Clint looked a bit green, especially when the catered breakfast appeared, and Natasha was wearing the same scrap of fabric she'd had on the night before. Bruce appeared to be experimenting on himself – unsuccessfully, if his dash to the wastebasket was any sign – and Tony's eyes were a disturbing shade of red. Steve kept his head down, and hoped no one remembered how much sleep Captain America had to lose before he looked as tired as he did.

 

“We have a serious threat,” Fury announced quietly, when he realized that speaking normally would only make them wince.

 

“To New York? Humanity? Spring fashion week?” The SHIELD commander could not cow a Stark into submission, hungover or not.

 

“To _you_.” Fury gestured at an aide, who started a slide show of what appeared to be a series of rather neat kills. Decapitation with a garrote, rifle shot to the head, family killed with oven gas. There were several more, and Bruce made another run to the trashcan. The rest of them just looked confused – except for Natasha, who had gone so still Steve couldn't tell if she was breathing.

 

“Um, no offense,” Clint interjected, “but don't we have the NYPD for serial killers? I mean, I know they're not as amazing as we are, but they seem to do all right on _Law and Order_.”

 

“Also,” Steve pointed out, “these photos are at least twenty years old.” He had been forced to scan decades of fashion magazines to understand how time had changed, and the pictures appeared to be from the 1970s if the hair gave any indication.

 

Fury smiled, an expression no more comforting on him than it was on Tony. “A point to the Captain,” he agreed. “These kills all range between 1950 and 1992, when they stopped abruptly. We believe they are the work of this man -” and the slide flipped to a rather blurry surveillance shot of a hat and a long coat, nowhere near enough to get an identification.

 

“The Winter Soldier.” Natasha's voice carried through the room, and she didn't flinch when Fury turned his assessing gaze on her.

 

“Very good, Agent Romanov. Any other information you'd like to give us?”

 

She lifted her chin, and didn't let her eyes flicker from Fury's to the screen. “He was the Red Room's finest, their prize. They kept him in stasis when he wasn't killing or training the best of us. When the war ended, I believed he had been . . . disposed of.”

 

“Apparently not.” Fury's tone was calm, even as he sent the slide show moving into more recent images, and then on to a somewhat red-faced, middle-aged man in a Russian newspaper photo. “That's Karpov. We believe he purchased the Winter Soldier from the Russian government after it collapsed. Our sources also indicate that Karpov has recently signed a very lucrative contract in which he promises to assassinate Captain America.” Natasha appeared far more concerned than Steve on hearing that. “We think it would be best if we moved first, and quickly. The goal here, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure the Soldier isn't a threat to anyone ever again.”

 

“Who assassinates the assassins?” Tony rumbled, sounding like a voiceover on television. “Who watches the watchers? The Avengers, contract killers by night – and day, actually.”

 

“We don't need to kill him,” Natasha protested, gripping the table edge, more unsettled than Steve had ever seen her. “He's been conditioned by the Soviets, but we have specialists for that. We know it works,” and they all knew exactly who it had worked on, she didn't say, “and he would make a good asset.”

 

“Too dangerous,” Fury answered. “We don't know that the Soldier was ever anything but a killer, and he's certainly never tried to defect. I've uploaded his dossier to your accounts. Do try to off him before he offs you. Meeting adjourned.”

 

~*~

 

Steve found Natasha in the corridor on his way to the Records Room. He didn't need to go there, he knew - he could convince Jarvis to put the reels and photos onto his computer and stay in his room – but he liked the silence of the room, the cloistered feeling of an old movie house or a dusty confessional.

 

Natasha was curled around her tablet, folded untidily on the floor as if she had fallen. She startled when Steve tapped her shoulder, making Steve jump in turn because it was  _impossible_ to sneak up on the Black Widow. “Are you all right?” he wondered, hovering over her, torn between being the leader his team needed and continuing down the hall to where Bucky waited, in sepia and shades of gray.

 

“His name is Djenya,” she replied dully, hands trailing over the tablet screen. “Or, at least, our handlers named him Djenya. I suppose you Americans would call him James.” Sighing, Steve leaned against the wall and slid down until he sat beside her.

 

The picture on the screen was from the dossier Fury had sent them, the only clear shot of the Soldier's face. It was in profile, dark hair down past sharp cheekbones and an aquiline nose over full lips. He was a handsome man, their killer. James. “He's planning my death, Natasha. I'd sort of prefer to avoid that,” he joked, wondering if it were true. From Natasha's cool gaze, she didn't quite believe it either. “Do you think Fury's wrong?”

 

She turned back to the tablet, considering Steve's question. “He trained me. He taught me how to kill without leaving a trace. How to listen through silences.” She paused, and Steve hadn't been trained to hear what wasn't said, but her hands traced over the Winter Soldier's image like Steve mapped Bucky through reels and across time. “He taught me how to escape from the Red Room, and where to go. I think he deserves the chance to make the same escape.”

 

“You love him.”

 

Her laugh was short, bitten off like nails chewed until they bled. “I could not have loved anyone then. But I believed I did. I wanted to. Now – I won't have the chance to try.”

 

And Steve would have given anything for that chance, would have bartered away his strength and his health and his fame if it could bring Bucky back, to a time when Steve was free to love him in all the ways he never could have before. “I'll talk to Fury,” he offered roughly, though they both knew it wouldn't do any good. “I'll think of something,” he promised, resting a hand on her shoulder while they studied the lines of the Winter Soldier's face.

 

~*~

 

Steve pulled James's picture up on a third projector while he flipped through copies of his old drawings that Jarvis had printed, done in the last year of the war. Finished before grief had numbed his fingers and all the beauty in the world had vanished off a mountain into unending white.

 

There were Howard and Peggy, heads bent over some indecipherable schematic, the charcoal disguising how fiery hair juxtaposed against black, dark lines unable to recreate the crimson of Peggy's smile or the gleam in Howard's. Dugan and Morita sat at a bombed out tavern somewhere in Poland, sharing a bottle of gin that had survived, and playing poker with half a deck of cards. Falsworth and Jones, enraptured with some intellectual game none of the others had understood, making up definitions for words and forcing the Commandos to guess if the definition was true. Steve had spent the rest of the war convinced that defecation and defenestration were synonyms, had probably made some sort of embarrassing error in a report to that effect. Dernier, delicately sewing up the tears in his fatigues, mouth tight in concentration as he worked. Bucky. Sprawled in a fleeting moment of hedonism on a hotel bed, his clothes forgotten on the floor, Steve's besotted expression hastily sketched into the corner, the reflection from the mirror hanging on the wall.

 

Bucky, with his sharp cheekbones and full lips, his sniper's grace and dark hair that never stayed in place.

 

Steve sat with his sketches on his lap and thought of Natasha, her bright hair and fierce intelligence that called to mind another woman, in a different time. He thought of Tony, the genius that lit up his face, the insouciance that called people to him, and drove them away. The black hair that could have been slicked back, the mustache he never grew. There was Bruce, who reminded him of a thin, energetic Frenchman attempting to build a bomb in a German helmet. Clint, who needed only a bowler hat and a fondness for lukewarm beer. Phil, who – wasn't Jones.

 

Jones, Dugan, Dernier, Howard, Peggy. They were all dead. Steve could draw their smiles and listen to them laugh on movie reels. He could see them in the curve of Natasha's neck and the rhythm of Tony's fingers and twisting lines of Clint's smirk, but it didn't change that Steve had woken up to a world where he was alone. What was the harm then, in one more ghost?

 

“Jarvis?” he asked, before he could change his mind, before he could gather all his memories and refuse to let them go. If the AI noticed that his voice trembled, it said nothing.

 

“Yes, sir? Would you like to see the next reel? Perhaps the 1943 photo set again?”

 

“No.” Steve's voice was hoarse. He coughed, tried to wet his lips with a tongue that felt clumsy and dry in his mouth. “Can you – Jarvis, can you alter these pictures?”

 

“Sir!” The computer sounded indignant. “I would never give you pictures that were not -”

 

Steve almost smiled. “I didn't mean it that way, Jarvis. But could you? Could you make – could you make Bucky look like the man in that photo?” He wiggled his hand at the picture of James, afraid to stare directly at it, to compare softer features and a squarer jaw and a more pronounced widow's peak to the face that he knew. Afraid to alter his own memories, before Jarvis even began.

 

“Well.” Jarvis hesitated. “I'm sure I _could_ , sir, but I don't think that would be wise.”

 

“Could you alter the SHIELD files, as well? So that their copies matched ours – so that if anyone saw either set, they would be the same?” No one could accuse Captain America of being a coward. Funny, that he thought the ultimate sacrifice would be losing Bucky once, not having to wake up seventy years later and do it all over again.

 

“Sir, I don't think this is an advisable course of action. If you would allow me to contact Mr. Stark?”

 

There was a moment of silence, expectant, the kind the Winter Soldier would have taught Natasha to listen for. Steve blinked away the tears clouding his vision, lingered over the planes of Bucky's chest, the muscles in his thighs and the delicate lines of his feet. He let himself peruse the shapes and shadows of the charcoal face, the nose a little crooked from a fight when they were young, the forehead wrinkled even in sleep. Then he steeled himself, and tore the printout into careful shreds. Jarvis may have gasped, but that may have been Steve trying to breathe. “Please, Jarvis. I am – I am trying to save a man's life. Can you help me?”

 

“Yes, sir.” And if a robot could be frightened by Steve's screaming, it could also be compassionate. Jarvis did not ask again, but the screens around the room began scrolling quickly through the copies of his old sketches, the government pictures and propaganda reels, Bucky's face filling and reshaping in each one until he was almost a blur.

 

Unrecognizable.

 

Steve closed his eyes, and tried not to scream.

 

~*~

 

“ _What?_ ” Tony voiced the question clearly on the tip of Fury's tongue, but everyone at the table was staring slack jawed at Captain America.

 

“That's not possible.” Phil's hand reached into his pocket, scrabbling for trading cards he didn't carry into the office. “I would have recognized Sgt. Barnes's profile, Captain.”

 

“Are you saying that I wouldn't, Agent Coulson?” Steve replied, keeping his tone hard. He tilted his head nonchalantly at the Soldier's image emblazoned on the far wall, glaring at Natasha until she snapped her mouth closed and stopped gaping. “Why don't you use your modern technology to prove me wrong, then?”

 

“Run facial recognition,” Fury bit out, and Coulson shoved past the hapless aide and typed in the commands himself. “Capt. Rogers,” the man went on, radiating anger past his eye patch and unshakable mien, “I realize that you miss your teammates, but this is not the way to get them back. Have you attended any meetings with the psychologists recently?”

 

Steve snorted, looked past Fury's tense jaw and shoulders and saw Col. Phillips, slamming a fist on the table until Falsworth stopped serenading Morita and Dernier paused in his attempts to teach Bucky how to juggle. There was no way to get his team back, and there was no way to keep them buried. God knew Steve had tried. It wasn't Fury who had to live with the ghosts.

 

“It's a match.” Coulson could barely be heard over the hum of disbelief in the conference room. “James Buchanan Barnes _is_ the Winter Soldier, like Captain America says.”

 

The pen in Fury's hands suffered a quick death at that pronouncement. “This doesn't change anything. We still -”

 

“This changes everything,” Tony shot back, dropping his chair back onto all four legs. “You want us to assassinate an _American hero_? How's that going to look on CNN?” Fury's expression clearly indicated that he hadn't intended the news to make it to CNN, or any other news channel. Tony managed to appear scandalized, though Steve doubted anything had scandalized Stark since he was ten. Maybe eight. “You rehabilitated Romanov. You dragged Capsicle here into the twenty-first century.” Tony eyed Steve, and shrugged. “Well, sort of. Surely all your mental experts can manage one ex-Soviet assassin?”

 

“He's right, sir,” Phil piped in, sounding a bit awed. “We can't kill Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.”

 

Fury exhaled loudly, and reached a hand up to rub the bridge of his nose. “All right, you bleeding hearts, give me a new plan. One where you somehow capture the world's most feared contract killer without accidentally bruising his  _heroic_ head. Then we'll see if anyone can find Sgt. Barnes under there.”

 

~*~

 

It's not that he avoided Natasha, after that. He had found a coffee shop near Stark Tower that served amazing croissants, almost as good as the ones Dernier had made their first morning in training, flaky layers practically dripping with butter. They had a coffee menu at least a yard long, but he ordered simple coffee, bitter and familiar. Bucky would have goggled at the menu, then ordered the most expensive, most complicated looking drink he could find. It was how he'd ended up with snails and raw beef at the restaurant in Paris. Steve brought his notebook out with him, but the pages stayed blank.

 

One day, he would find beauty in the woman hurrying along the sidewalk, heels slipping dangerously over each patch of ice. Passersby were yet unbowed by winter, surprised to come out of the subway and find snow twisting through the air, their hands chapped from cold where they had not yet thought to bring their gloves. One day, he would look out the enormous window and feel compelled to draw the businessmen hurrying home from work, cheeks and ears pink against their white clouds of breath, the teenagers lingering after school despite the bitter wind.

 

Or he would never draw again, because Bucky had always been the beauty in the world, and he couldn't put Bucky to paper without fearing that SHIELD would find it. Or fearing that the picture would not be right, which would mean that Bucky's face was lost forever, from the records and from Steve's too fallible memories.

 

Of course, Natasha found him anyway, arm in arm with Pepper as though they were red-headed sisters out to lunch and she had not planned to catch Steve at all. When Pepper went to order, the Black Widow slipped into a stool that Steve knew had been occupied.

 

“You should not have done that,” she whispered, her reflection staring hard at Steve while he gazed blankly into the glass. Her hair was curled and a little windswept, tucked under a cap that reminded Steve of heroines in the films he'd grown up with. A heroine he'd served with, her own red hair pulled severely back in a bun, her cap Army green.

 

“Did you have a better plan?” he sighed back. His reflection looked tired, dark violet smudges under faded blue eyes, lines he didn't remember etched around his mouth. And if the stubble could be measured, his reflection hadn't shaved in several days, either.

 

Her copper eyebrows drew down in displeasure. “No,” she admitted. “I owe you a debt for this, Captain.”

 

He scrubbed his too-large hands over his face, refusing to notice that he was not – would never be – wearing a ring on the third finger of his left hand. “What would you give me for this, then? What could you possibly offer that would wipe this from the slate?” Steve turned toward her, softening his words with his first attempt at a smile since Fury had given them the Soldier's dossier.

 

Her hands clenched into tight fists, aubergine nails digging into pinked skin. She blinked rapidly, and Steve spoke before the shame could coalesce in her eyes. “This isn't a debt, Nat.” He swallowed hard, but kept talking. “I joined the war to fight for my country, but Bucky – Bucky joined because scrawny Tommy Kaminsky on our block got drafted, and Buck worried he wouldn't make it through basic training without someone to watch his back.” The words tasted like shards of glass on his tongue, but he had already given Bucky to Natasha. He could share the history, as well as the face. “Bucky went to war to save people. He would have saved your James, if he could.”

 

Steve twisted blindly off his stool as he finished, knowing he couldn't stay there any longer without weeping or crushing Natasha's sympathetic hand beneath his own. He stumbled out the door without saying good bye, leaving his blank sketchbook and a half-eaten croissant, the thin layers of pastry already going stale.

 

~*~

 

It was surprisingly easy to catch the Winter Soldier, after all the warnings Fury issued and the amount of training Steve had done. The training he didn't regret, throwing himself into melees against the Black Widow and Hawkeye and Iron Man with an intensity that let him forget everything but the adrenaline under his skin and the burn of his muscles, the solid weight of his shield in his hands.

 

The Soldier shot at Captain America during a charity gala, and he missed. Steve hoped that SHIELD took that as a sign of suppressed affection, because it had taken him a lot of effort to constantly listen for the whistle of bullets everywhere he went, and to duck before getting hit. It took a split-second longer to decide if he  _wanted_ to duck.

 

Natasha and Clint had already been circling the perimeter, and the Black Widow was the Soldier's best student for a reason. They all made it back to SHIELD headquarters in record time, Steve insisting that he be the one to carry the unconscious assassin through the front doors. He had worked in show business for a year, after all, and knew the value of a good entrance. Fury showed up seconds later, his expression as unreadable as ever. He might have been pleased at their skill. Or irritated that they hadn't shot the bastard like he had hoped. Coulson just looked a bit starstruck. Thankfully he had stopped looking at Captain America like that months ago.

 

Steve reluctantly handed off his deadly cargo to the facility medics, and acquiesced with a nod when Natasha insisted on being the one to go with James. “I understand him best,” she argued to Fury. “If he wakes up and he is disoriented, the Captain will not be able to respond.” She and Steve did not glance at each other, but her small hand reached out and rested briefly over his, pressing words she could never say into his skin before she strode down the hall after the stretcher.

 

The Avengers watched them go, unusually quiet. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” Clint quipped, still in his mask and carrying his bow. Phil elbowed his partner, then sighed and rested a hand on his back. Tony, for once, didn't seem inclined to say anything, though he gazed after the Winter Soldier with a disconcerting intensity.

 

Probably eager to follow his medics and the Black Widow, Fury paused to round on Captain America and attempt to exude sympathy. Steve thought the man looked constipated. “Now, Rogers,” he warned, “remember that the Winter Soldier has been brainwashed for decades, and has hundreds of kills to his name. Even if we can restore his memories, you should know that he's likely to be a very different man than Sgt. Barnes.”

 

The laughter escaped Steve's chest in bursts, burbling up without his permission and into Fury's tight-lipped space. “Oh, don't worry, sir,” he snorted, the hysteria edging into his words. “I expect I won't recognize James at all.”

 

Fury nodded shortly, uncomfortable with the choked snickering Steve couldn't stop, and marched off down the hall, Phil following on his heels. Bruce wrapped a kind arm around Steve's tuxedo, rubbing at the nearest shoulder. “Hey, let's get you home, huh?” Clint went for the car while Banner made soothing noises and Tony . . . Tony watched Captain America like he could see past the shiny paneling to the corroded battery of Steve's soul.

 

~*~

 

It was three o'clock in the morning when Tony burst into Steve's room, the door slamming like the clatter of a useless shield on the metal floor of a train. The Stark heir, ever the pragmatist, emptied a pitcher of water over Steve's head to stop the screaming, then sat down on the dry side of the bed.

 

“What have you done to my AI, Rogers?” he demanded, arms folded over the bright reactor core in his chest. He didn't seem inclined to wait for Steve to shake off the last, shadowed dregs of the dream, to realize that his face was drenched in water and not tears that froze instead of falling into the chasm below.

 

“What?” His voice cracked and died halfway through the word. He scrubbed his hair back and tried again. “Tony, what are you talking about?”

 

In the dark, Tony could be almost any pale, dark-haired man taking up the other half of Steve's enormous bed. If Steve closed his eyes, he could imagine that the regular breathing in his echoing, cavernous room meant that - “Capsicle, pay attention!” Meant nothing at all, except a fresh reminder that he was alone. “You've given Jarvis a guilt complex. I think you may be giving me a guilt complex – I may need surgery to get it removed.” Tony rubbed the space between his ribs, as though he suspected the guilt of taking up residence there, and scowled. “Who  _is_ that guy we're calling your boyfriend?”

 

Steve didn't flinch. No one had ever called Bucky Barnes his boyfriend. Friend, roommate, comrade, but never anything more. They'd lived in the wrong time, and the only one who had ever put a name to them had been Bucky, before either them were even old enough to know what it meant.  _You're mine, you fool, so stop trying to let Bobby Reznick finish you off. Bad enough I have to see his ugly mug at school without letting him ruin yours._

 

_You're mine._

 

“Jarvis told you?” he wondered, glaring at the lavender ceiling. After the first month of nightmares, Pepper had suggested painting the room in soothing colors, and now it felt like some sort of quiet Easter egg that shattered every night.

 

“Oh, don't look like that.” Tony dismissed his betrayal with one manicured hand. “As though dad hadn't played those reels at least once a week, and twice on holidays. If the Winter Soldier is his precious Jamie Barnes, I'll eat whatever Bruce has growing in the lab.” Jamie. Howard had called Bucky “Jamie,” as if determined to be eccentric even in naming his friends. Steve had forgotten that.

 

Steve had forgotten that they would climb into Stark's plane and Bucky would drop into the co-pilot's seat, uninvited, and Howard would light up and shout, “Hey, Jamie! Miss being where the real action is?” And Bucky would grin, teeth bright against the dirt-smudged stubble on his face when he slapped the inventor on the shoulder and replied, “Howie, you ever going to ditch this tin can? There's a war on, you know.” That wasn't on the reels and it wasn't in the documentaries and if Howard had kept a diary Steve didn't know about it. Only Steve was left to remember Bucky, and he had forgotten.

 

“Rogers? Cap? Hell, where do you keep the water here?” Stark was waving his hand in front of Steve's face, and for a moment Steve could see Tony and Bucky sitting side by side in the helicarrier, trading insults like baseball cards, and his chest constricted with an ache that inexplicably made it impossible to breathe. It was harder than anyone realized, living with ghosts. “So, the Russian assassin? Any reason we're all pretending he's really a sweet kid from Brooklyn?”

 

He shrugged. “Bucky's dead,” he offered, twisting his head to crack his neck and avoid Tony's eyes.

 

“Believe me, Cap, you make that clear every night around two am. But I'm still not sure why you couldn't replace him with someone a little less . . . fatal.” They both sat there for a moment, Steve keeping his gaze on the window and the city below, listening to Tony's quiet exhalations. “Right, your hero complex. Romanov's in love with him, and you decided to take one for the team and deface some priceless historical records.”

 

Suddenly desperate that Tony understand, Steve swung back around. “But what if he _had_ been Bucky? Don't you see – how kind everyone is, how much hope they have just because they think he spent twenty years as my friend before he spent half a century as a weapon?” It wasn't Bucky, of course. Just Steve and his ghosts. “He deserves a chance to be human, no matter who he was.”

 

“Some people are criminals,” Tony shot back, but his shoulders had slumped and Captain America recognized victory when he saw it.

 

“Then let him choose to be a criminal. Let him choose his life.”

 

And the Stark genius flared in a narrowed gaze. “What about you, Capsicle? You make any choices about your shiny new life?”

 

He almost smiled, at Tony's odd empathy and how Howard had always understood machines and never people, convinced the latter would act like the former if they could only find the right formula. Steve had chosen to crash a plane into the ocean, to follow his friend into the abyss – but he had chosen the serum first, decided to ignore his promise to Bucky to stay safe. He had selfishly chosen the serum, not so that he could find his friend on the battlefield but because he wanted to stop being so  _weak._ Now there was only repentance, for the choices that had brought him here, alone. But Tony was not the priest, and he didn't need to know that sometimes only Steve's fumbling catechism kept him from making the same choice he had at the war's end, from climbing to the roof of Stark tower and reaching out to catch Bucky in the fall. “I chose to resurrect Bucky Barnes, didn't I?” he said instead, tone flat, calm in the way he'd heard Bruce use to soothe Tony after a meeting with the Board.

 

“You're an idiot,” Tony responded, still put out. “But fine, we'll rehabilitate the mass murderer and I won't tell anyone how stupid you are if you stop emotionally manipulating Jarvis.” He climbed off the bed, rocking from foot to foot as he tried to jam his hands into pockets that weren't there. Still damp from Tony's original assault, Steve tilted his head and waited. “I have pictures of Bruce and Pepper,” he finally mumbled, jaw clenched. “I have videos.” And Steve waited for the innuendo, but Tony seemed unaware he'd said anything at all. “On my phone. In the lab. I couldn't – If they – If I couldn't _see_ them -”

 

“It's all right,” Steve shushed him, out of the bed with his hand hovering over Tony's shoulder before either of them could blink. Tony looked up, eyes dark and torn with comprehension. “Go back to bed,” he offered, knowing that the other man could cross the hall and find who he was looking for, could press fingers to flesh and know they were real. “It doesn't seem so bad in the morning.”

 

“You're an idiot,” Tony answered, and hurried out of the room, leaving Steve with waterlogged sheets and a view of the still, inhuman city at night.

 

Three days later, he gave Steve a phone. “I already have a phone,” Steve pointed out. “And a tablet. And a kindling -”

 

“Kindle,” Tony interrupted. “And this one's not hooked up to any network, it's password protected, and the screen is designed so surveillance cameras can't pick up any images that appear.” He raised his eyebrows, expectant, and Steve tried to oblige.

 

“Um, Tony, what good is a phone that's not hooked up?”

 

The youngest Stark genius growled and tugged the phone out of Steve's hands, slowly typing in a long, random series of numbers he expected Steve's brain to keep straight. Then tapped on an icon with a movie reel, and Steve couldn't help covering the phone with his hand and scanning the living room for cameras or SHIELD personnel. Tony rolled his eyes. “It's secure, remember? So secure only Jarvis knows about it, since he was the one who had to change everything back. You're lucky I've programmed layered memory into him.” The phone started to slide from Steve's grasp, and he noticed his hands were trembling.

 

“Tony, what if -”

 

“No one's going to see this but you. No one else could imagine Captain Virtuous is such a good liar, anyway. Just – ” His hand went to his back pocket, where he kept his own phone, and Steve thought about Tony's stricken expression when he'd said _I have pictures_. “Just don't lose him again,” he blurted out, and Steve waited for Tony to realize his mistake.

 

“Yes,” he agreed, when enlightenment didn't appear forthcoming. “Losing him would be the worst thing I could imagine. Might even give me nightmares.” Tony flinched, but Starks didn't apologize and so the dark-haired man only shrugged and studied Steve with his head tilted to the side. Unwilling to handle Tony's scrutiny when he could feel the tremors work up from his hands to his shoulders, Steve turned and fled. But he took the phone with him when he left.

 

When Bruce asked Jarvis if there had been any nightmares the next morning, Jarvis could finally say no. With the new phone – with Bucky's face, as it was meant to be, smiling only a few inches from his own eyes – Steve hadn't slept at all.

 

~*~

 

James came home on a Tuesday, near the end of February. They had asked Captain America if he wanted to come to the hospital, if he wanted to stand outside the glass and get at least a glimpse of his friend. Steve had touched the phone tucked in his back pocket and shaken his head, offering no explanations. It was February, and the Tower vibrated under the steady assault of frozen rain, lashing against windows and blurring the world beyond to an impenetrable grey.

 

SHIELD had brought James in the front while Steve escaped out through the garage, ducking Jarvis and the security guards hired for the occasion in his bare feet and worn jeans. The sluicing rain soaked through his thin shirt within seconds, plastering his hair to his head and running in icy patterns down his back. When the sun shone in this new world, Steve couldn't remember if it had always been that pale, if days had truly been brighter when he was young. When it snowed, he wasn't sure if he recognized the swirling flakes from an orphanage window in New York or a mountaintop in Europe. But the sleet, the pounding sheets of rain that numbed his hands and swirled in rivers over his bare feet – this Steve could feel in the longing that clung to his dreams, that lived high in the back of his throat, impossible to swallow or ignore.

 

He had been eighteen and still too small and sickly, but too old to stay in the orphanage any longer. Bucky, not yet fifteen, his face trapped between childhood and lean adolescence, had followed him out into the world with little more than a shrug and a brazen smile for the nuns. They shared a single room in a tenement that seemed more hospitable to the rats than the paying tenants, the bathroom at the end of the hall warmed only by the fact that it was never empty, shared by all twenty people crammed onto their floor. He had been eighteen, and it had been February – Bucky's birthday, but Steve had burned his fingers trying to bake a cake on top of the stove, and so Bucky had overridden Steve's protests and disappeared into the winter tempest rattling against their window to buy ointment from the chemist's.

 

Steve had stood at the window and watched Bucky run the last block home. His dark hair was too long, poured over his forehead and into his eyes, and he'd left his shoes inside by the stove because he'd need them dry for work tomorrow. His coat was from the orphanage, big for a fifteen-year-old boy and too thin for winter in New York, and his face was white from the chill even through the grey of the rain and the dark cast of the sky. With no shoes and a jacket that made him look like a gawky child, it was clearer than ever that Bucky should never have left the orphanage. Then he'd glanced up at their window, pushed his hair back to catch sight of Steve's back-lit silhouette, and smiled. A flash of teeth, a glimpse of the way Bucky's eyes always softened when they rested on Steve. Awareness hit Steve like a swift right hook, from the curve of Bucky's ear to the soft rise of his chest when only his even breathing and warm chest might get them both through another feverish night.

 

Steve met him at the door, somehow unable to think of what he might be doing or what a terrible idea it was or what might happen after he buried his overheated, burned fingers in cold, dripping hair and stretched up to lick the trails of ice water off of numb cheeks, nose, chin. Bucky went utterly still. Horrified, Steve pulled back, tongue still cool from the rain water and tasting of New York, tasting of Bucky's skin. “Bucky? Oh jeez, I'm sor-”

 

“Steve,” Bucky breathed, voice going high and broken at the end. He kicked the door shut, red and frozen hands hovering over Steve's dry shirtsleeves and spindly arms. “Steve.” His name got lost in the cool press of Bucky's lips against his as the younger boy bent his head forward even as he stripped out of his wet coat without letting it brush Steve's fragile chest. Then fingers still curled and unwieldy from the cold wrapped around Steve's waist, and Bucky's tongue chased the taste of rain from Steve's mouth, pressing his name into lips and teeth and gums.

 

He had been eighteen, and it had been raining and Bucky's skin had been pale and shivery from the cold, his breath mingled with Steve's own.

 

When Tony found him, almost an hour later, Captain America was curled against the Tower wall, hands and feet discolored from the cold, mouth open to catch the frozen New York rain.

 

~*~

 

After a few days of cursing at Steve and making Jarvis keep the heat at a sweltering ninety degrees, Tony lifted the quarantine for “deadly stupidity” and unlocked the door to Steve's rooms. It was another day before Steve came out, poring through his sketches of Bucky's hands, ankles, collarbone on the secret phone while his own sketchbook lay empty on the bed.

 

He was making himself lunch when James came around the corner and stopped, startled. It was an act, of course; a world-class assassin would have heard the pop of frying bacon and the rustle of the plastic as he opened a new loaf of bread. Natasha's quiet approach from the other doorway meant they'd planned this, gaging Captain America's reaction to the Winter Soldier's return. And James didn't look like Bucky, not really. His eyes were set closer together and his nose wasn't crooked and James's cheekbones were sharp, but Bucky's had looked as though they'd been hewn by a diamond cutter. He didn't look like Bucky, but he had been watching the film reels, and knew how to move with a Brooklyn swagger and a sniper's grace, how to tilt his head to the right and wait for Superman to make the first move.

 

But Captain America knew how to live with the dead. “Sandwich?” he offered, his voice as steady as his hands as they chopped a head of lettuce into even eighths. The reflection from the window showed that Natasha had walked into the room, her small hand pressed to the metal of James's arm, holding him in place with a glance and a touch.

 

“No. Thank you.” The sentences were worlds apart, but Steve nodded as though James had simply answered his question about lunch, and flipped a lychee from the fruit bowl into Natasha's hands. They left silently a moment later, and Steve did not look up to study dark hair and slim hips and a too-familiar gait.

 

This time, Tony took one look at the fifteen BLTs plated neatly on the table, and Steve stalwartly frying a new pan of bacon, and declared they were all going back to the club.

 

Clint danced with Tony, who let the archer use his shoulders as a springboard for acrobatics, while Pepper dragged Bruce onto the floor when the music gentled, and Phil watched their drinks and them from the second floor. Steve closed his eyes and lost himself in the unknown beat and electronic noise, the smells of sweat and sweet drinks and chemicals. He let a giant of a man press him into the locked bathroom door, hands large enough that Steve could feel small, his chest sensitive to every draft and winter chill, pressed beneath a well-known warmth.

 

He left out the employees' exit, texting Tony to tell him he was going home. The hitch in his step would be gone in an hour, at most, and the ache in his chest couldn't be helped. As he cut through another alley, he came upon a skinny kid painting a concrete wall.

 

~*~

 

The kid called himself Jaime, all angles and twitchy brown eyes two shades darker than his skin and lighter than the tattoos etched down his arms with cheap ink and razorblades. The “tags” were done with canisters of paint that Jaime said was called spray paint, and told Captain America to buy his own if he was so interested. So he did, and the hardware shop happened to be next to the diner, so he bought Jaime a cheeseburger deluxe while they were there.

 

His first attempts did nothing but make Jaime laugh, finger pressed too hard or canister too close, all thick lines dripping down to the pavement. But Steve's first sketch with charcoal had given Bucky a left arm twice as long as his right, and a chin that left no room for a neck. It was the drawing Bucky had tucked into the rafters, bringing it down only to take it with them when they moved, the first thing that had hung on their thin tenement walls. After a week, he had gotten good enough that Jaime recruited his older brother, Raul, to teach Steve the finer points of turning tags into art.

 

Two weeks later Clint taped the _Post_ to the fridge, the front page article about a sudden rash of graffiti on Wall Street skyscrapers and Brooklyn bricks, all portraits of a young man in World War II Army uniform, holding a rifle that obscured half his face. People were calling the artist “the Sniper,” though in their copy, someone had added “'s best friend” in sloppy marginalia.

 

James found him painting one night, hooked into his harness and hanging off the side of the Citi executive offices. He wore the dark, form-fitting suit they had caught the Soldier in, invisible except for the pale planes of his face. “We should, perhaps, be friends?” he finally said, proffering the yellow paint Steve had been looking for, hanging from the rope with his metal hand. “It would be more to form.”

 

Looking up from the sticky, aerosol line of Bucky's jaw to the pulsing life in the Winter Soldier's, Steve fought down a bitter laugh. “They think that you've been shattered beyond repair, that they rebuilt you with their electronics and their psychiatrists.” He pressed his hand to the chilled glass of the building, in the dark space that would be Bucky's eyes, hidden by the line of his weapon, the unflinching metal of his gun. “More likely that you would just be a reminder that he's – gone. That I would want to stay as far away from you as possible, to keep him close.”

 

Steve didn't glance up again until he heard the police sirens, and by then the Soldier was no more than a shadow in the bone-chilling wind.

 

Pepper found Jaime a place in a high school focused on the arts, and bought what seemed like half of Brooklyn to start a house for at-risk boys. Steve, Jaime and Raul spent a week putting the murals on the walls, and the Sniper traded his rifle and uniform for suspenders and a smile hidden by the sprawling violets of Jaime's wild sunrise.

 

~*~

 

Painting pieces of Bucky's face across the city that had raised him and following Howard – Tony to clubs every weekend didn't stop the ache in Steve's chest, or the screaming, but it dulled the sharp, eviscerating edge of it for an hour or two, kept him from shattering the window that took up the far wall of his bedroom and diving into the dazzling lights. It let him pass James in the hall without choking on the loss.

 

Steve could sit in the living room, watching Dugan argue with Jones while Peggy spoke in hushed tones to Dernier and Howard broke the television, again, and know that none of it was real. Howard had never watched Steve the way Tony did. Or if he had, Steve had been too submerged in grief to notice anyone except the one man who wasn't there. When he thought of Howard now, he knew that he had overlaid him with Tony's dark eyes and a laugh that burst out of his chest instead of rolling off his tongue. Peggy hadn't twirled knives through her fingers when she grew bored, or tucked her hair behind her ears when she was planning the details of an unfriendly merger. The ghosts in Steve's eyes were beginning to blur into the men and women around him. He didn't look across the room to where Bucky would never sit, didn't listen to James's hoarse voice trade shooting statistics with Clint. He focused on Natasha's small smiles, the way happiness hovered over her face as if it weren't sure yet how to settle. When it got to be too much, he took his duffel and his harness and slipped out into the frozen streets.

 

Then, of course, the Red Skull came back – the wrong kind of ghost, the real thing, laughing when he dispatched Iron Man using the stolen tesseract and turned to see Captain America, both of them men out of time. “Lost your Commandos, haven't you, Captain?” he cackled, casting lightning from his fingertips. “Just like you lost your little sidekick off the train.” The Hulk roared out of sight, busy fighting a new batch of Hydra operatives. The Soldier and the Widow were trying to disable the system the Red Skull had rigged to turn the subways into an inferno, while Hawkeye picked people off from a nearby roof. “Who's left, hmm?” His voice reverberated through the tesseract and through Steve's sternum, the hit he scored to Captain America's leg with lightning enough to distract him from the shield hurled expertly toward his throat. When he glanced up and saw it coming, all he did was laugh, the sound shrieking like torn metal through the air. “It's a brave new world, _Captain_ , and you're all alone.”

 

~*~

 

Pepper hired one of her employees to dress like Captain America and accept the Mayor's thanks for saving New York from the Red Skull, and he gave a speech promoting Jaime's new home for children like he and Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes had been – poor, unwanted, extra mouths to feed in a city that had inured itself to hunger and pain – then introduced Djenya as James, and fielded the reporters' questions about the new American hero.

 

She had tried to cajole Steve, but Jarvis wouldn't let any of them into his rooms, murmuring apologetically that “Capt. Rogers doesn't want visitors, at the moment.”

 

Capt. Rogers had thrown his duffel full of paint canisters into the trash chute, left his personal phone on a bed still neatly made. He sat with his sketchbook on his lap, charcoal clenched in his hands. On the floor, gazing out the window at Manhattan, all he could see was the dimple in Bucky's cheek when he smiled, the fear blazing through his eyes when he fell. Charcoal pressed into dust under his fingers, and the pages of the sketchpad stayed blank. _What's left? Just like you lost your little sidekick off the train._

 

_It's a brave new world. And you're all alone._

 

After four days, he had crushed ten pencils, broken the nightstand when he reached for Bucky and hit mahogany instead, and screamed his throat too raw to speak. He could see four Sniper portraits from his window, but painting Bucky across the Manhattan skyline wouldn't bring him back. Resurrecting Bucky's kindness, creating another ghost in the Tower, still wouldn't bring him back. Steve had pictures, but Tony didn't understand what it meant when he could touch Pepper's smile or the line of Bruce's neck. Steve had orbited Bucky's fierce grin and gentle hands for as long as he could remember. He didn't know how to keep existing without them. And he was so tired of being alone.

 

James slipped onto the roof top while Steve sat quietly on the ledge, looking at the reflected light in the sky and thinking of thousands of stars glittering off fresh, alpine snow. They wouldn't be able to bury him in the Catholic cemetery, but Steve had stopped praying after a still, silent scream in 1944. The Winter Soldier stole up behind him, shattering the quiet with his breath.

 

“Go back to Natasha,” Steve told him, curling his fingers over the concrete ledge and thinking of lips numbed by icy rain, bare feet splashing through puddles in the dark.

 

“Natasha owes you a debt.” The Soldier moved impossibly closer, his chin almost resting on Steve's head. “I owe you my life.” A hand – too warm, flesh and blood where Steve had only memories – curled gently under Steve's chin. “Come back inside,” the hoarse voice commanded, shifting so that the metal hand could rest on Steve's hip.

 

“You're not him.” Steve shook his head to dislodge the hand, more comfortable with the winter-cold metal of the Soldier's other hand. Bucky was gone, and Steve was _all alone._

 

Undeterred, James ran both hands onto the muscles of Steve's thighs. “No,” he admitted, the words brushing against the reddened rim of Steve's ear. “But I can be, for a little while.” And he wasn't Bucky, who had begged Steve to live every winter since he was five, who had pounded the phlegm from his lungs and sponged the sweat from his rattling, fevered chest, jaw clenched and eyes black with fears he wouldn't name. It wouldn't matter in the end, if he pretended for a little while longer.

 

James led them back to Steve's rooms, the Brooklyn swagger he'd learned from old film reels drawing Steve's hands to wiggling hips. Once inside, he slid easily to his knees, hiding his face in the soft fabric of Steve's pajama bottoms, mouthing warm breaths onto Steve's cock. The only light came from the city, glowing through the window that made up the bedroom wall, and all Steve saw when he looked down was familiar dark hair and broad shoulders. Metal and flesh hands tugged on his until he buried his fingers in the hair and tugged hard. Even with his eyes open, it could be Bucky gone too long without a trim, hair soft from the strange European water and lips chapped from kissing and cold. Bucky's clever tongue lapping at the head of his cock, the heat of his mouth as he sucked Steve to the root, rubbing a twice-broken nose into dusky blond curls.

 

Bucky had seen Mary Ann sucking on Irv Merkel's dick in an alley, and determined to do it to Steve. The first time he'd tried, Steve had been mortified until he watched his cock disappear between Bucky's lips, and then come so quickly that Bucky had coughed and nearly bitten him. They'd gotten better, after that, and Bucky would hum along to the Andrews Sisters while Steve pulled on his charcoal and ink hair and tried not to wake their neighbors. The ghost on his knees before Steve didn't hum, but he did groan when Steve pushed fingers against his cheek to feel the slide of his cock in a familiar mouth, and Steve could fill in the missing notes, the kerosene smell of the tenement. He could watch black hair and red lips and bite off the cry for a man who wouldn't hear him when he came.

 

James kept sucking until Steve shivered and wriggled away, then glanced up and brushed his metal fingers over Steve's ass and down to more sensitive skin, his thin eyebrows raised in question. “Yes,” Steve answered immediately, closing his eyes to keep up the facade a little longer, gesturing at the broken nightstand Tony had supplied after the first visit to the club. He stripped off his pajamas and lay on his stomach, a pillow shoved under his hips. “Harder,” he whispered, when the fingers were too tentative, when they clearly weren't those fingers that had searched Steve for pox marks, or bound up countless broken ribs. Then the hands moved with more surety over his back, under his bent arms and across his nipples, down his sides. The body blanketing him might have known him for forever, kept him alive through winters when the heat went out. The man inside him might have been the better half of Steve's soul, crying “Steve” into his mouth through the remnants of rain, shouting for him when there was no hope for salvation. “Bucky,” Steve begged, and metal fingers wrapped around his cock while the pulse of a flesh and blood hand clenched over his hip, holding the brave new world at bay for a few minutes more.

 

Afterward, James laid on his back, propped up by the unsoiled pillows, and dragged Steve against his side, blond head resting on a pale chest. He must have learned the position from Captain America's old sketchbooks, altered by Jarvis and on file with SHIELD. Steve listened to the rapid pulse of the heart beneath his ear, the light sheen of sweat across the muscled chest. Human fingers carded through the hair over his ear, brushed back the hair stuck to the perspiration on his forehead. If Steve closed his eyes it could be Bucky, the same rifle calluses and long, thin hands scattered half-drawn through his memories.

 

“He wouldn't want this for you.” James's fingers didn't stop combing through his hair, his low voice still slightly out of breath.

 

It had been Steve who wanted to talk after sex – who wanted to talk  _all the time_ , Bucky said – and he would list and re-list all the things they were going to do, the heroes they were going to be, while Bucky drew patterns on his skull and made agreeable noises, the contentment rolling through his chest as though he were a giant cat. “You're not him,” Steve replied, into the gentle concavity of James's breastbone.

 

“No.” He paused, pressed his lips into Steve's hair, breathing softly against his scalp. “But you are not a hard man to love, Captain.” The words settled around them, onto Tony's broken nightstand and Pepper's lavender walls, the fern Bruce had bought him, the dart board Clint convinced him to try, the pillow Natasha had embroidered. “He would have wanted you to be happy.”

 

“ _How_?” Steve shot back before he realized he had spoken, voice cracked and bleeding in a way he had not wanted any of them to see. “How, when he's gone?”

 

James had been trained to ignore suffering, and his fingers didn't shake when they resumed carding through Steve's hair, though his breath caught in the lungs under Steve's ear. “I don't know,” he confessed. “I'm not – I don't know what happy is, yet.” And Steve thought of Natasha, the joy foreign to her face. Of James, who had been made and re-made for anger, death, and pain. “But. Don't you owe it to him to try?”

 

When Steve woke up, his scream echoed in the room, the white of the snow and the terror scrawled across Bucky's face seared into his eyes, imprinted onto his shaking hands and the sour taste from his throat. He reached out, but found only a few pillows and a fading indentation in the mattress. The bed had long since gone cold.

 

~*~

 

The next morning, Steve went to the coffee shop before they opened, climbing the fire escape to the roof. He watched the sun rise, untamed, sprawling roses and reds and violets arcing off clouds and over skyscrapers. When he leaped down, the cherry tree nestled in the city sidewalk rained fresh, pink blossoms on his head. The air was fresh and a little moist, and people passing Steve began to uncurl their shoulders, startled to find winter no longer pressing them toward the ground.

 

He went inside, stood in line behind two teenage girls who flirted with the barista, then leaned into each other. He ordered two croissants, and the most complicated, most expensive drink on the menu. Bucky would have dared him, the quicksilver grin ricocheting through Steve's heart, flashing through the pulses of light when he closed his eyes. The drink was enormous, heaped with whipped cream, and tasted like caramel and almonds, like rain against cool lips, like smoky kisses over a map of Europe.

 

Sitting on the stool at the picture window, he bit into the pastry, the flash of Dernier's proud smile a reflection no one else could see. Outside, cherry blossoms dripped onto businessmen all in black, onto an elderly woman pushed along by a cheerful caretaker, beads clicking at the bottom of her cornrows. He watched the spring sun shine bright and painful – cauterizing, fire over a hemorrhaging wound, the blinding white of the snow in the Alps. He studied the wrinkles on the woman's hands, the velvet of her jacket, the gentle smile when her caretaker leaned down with a whole sprig of flowers. And he reached for his sketchbook, and started to draw.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: This is an AU where Bucky Barnes is _not the Winter Soldier. So he stays very much dead in this._


End file.
